One among the top tier of President Obama’s army of surrogates strikes again. Trying to promote Team O’s latest messaging that, why yes, we are indeed shameless enough to actually embrace our economic record and spin it as a positive, President Bill Clinton painted a picture of Americans that was somewhat less than flattering on the campaign trail on Friday, via CBS News:

Campaigning for Obama in Green Bay, Wis., Clinton urged voters to stay the course as more signs of a recovery sink in. Clinton said voters should judge Obama on the past three years, in which private sector job growth has made up for lost ground.

“This shouldn’t be a race,” Clinton said. “The only reason it is, is because Americans are impatient on things not made before yesterday and they don’t understand why the economy is not totally hunky-dory again.”

The former president said Obama’s difficulty in his race with Republican challenger Mitt Romney is that “people don’t feel it yet” even as the unemployment rate ticks down and the manufacturing sector perks up.

Oh, of course — but for those damnably impatient Americans who have spent the last few years watching their incomes shrink and gas and food prices rise; who’ve seen their employers dropping health insurance plans; who’ve been unemployed or underemployed for months on end; they just don’t get it. Forget that President Obama employed Keynesian principles that have kept us in the most milquetoast economic recovery since the Great Depression: There are just too many factors outside of his control, for which we shouldn’t blame him, and if we just hike taxes a bit on the wealthiest few Americans (who already happen to shoulder the largest tax burden while providing jobs for others), then we can just take our sweet time reforming our current spending habits while adding trillions to the debt.